I'm not sure who "the company" refers to if its not anyone currently on staff...

But, I can understand your annoyance at past mistakes. Hell, part of why I became a developer was to put an end to the "endless" spell reviews and rebalancing, get crafting out and add high level content. Many things that looked easy to do as a player actually were! And many things were a godawful mess that still keeps me up and suffering from night terrors.

>> hitting skillcaps and quitting

That is 100% a given for some player - and that is fine. Not everyone likes to hang around for the RP once they've "beat" the game. Other players re-roll every 6 months and never experience high level content - and that is fine too. If development is constantly leap-frogging player circling, the arms race would never end and the game would suffer (or be an utter grind fest like EQ2 and WOW Raiding can be).

DR is also not a gear-game. In EQ2, WoW, SWToR they can endlessly add a new equipment Tier and make people grind 100 hours to obtain it every 3 months. I've seen several games killed via becoming gear-centric and it removes the "sandbox" feel IMO.

>>The ugly truth is

Eh? The only reason we are advertising is because we were asked by players like yourself to do so. I enjoy talking about DR, but do wonder if my time would be better served working on some of the issues you've raised here .

>> DR

A game with as old a history as DR is bound to have some skele-*cough* I mean elite elder dire liches hiding in the closet. It isn't all bad though. We can laugh at the time someone picked up the ferry (along with everyone on it) and tossed it in their backpack, and groan at the days when training TM involved "plinking" badgers in the eye for 4 hours to mind lock. The best games are always changing, always growing, and I think DR has more than a few surprises left for folks willing to give it a try.

Someone asked why they're looking for new players. The ugly truth is that without new suckers they will slowly become insolvent as people cancel credit cards that are paying for accounts they forgot about.

The players pushed a drive for some advertising, not the company. We love the game, and want new people to experience it. Its as simple as that.

I wanted to give a quick update as we just released the first of the 3 Alchemy disciplines to the game this evening. Remedy crafting replaces an older system of healing herbs and allows players to make all manner of curative draughts and poultices for fixing themselves up after combat - along with a bunch of roleplay oriented remedies. It has technically been out for a month in the Platinum instance, and now is hitting the Prime instance. Next up - Enchantment!